How to fix RSS

I love RSS, but it certainly isn't perfect. Far from it, in fact. And Robert Scoble is starting to realize this.

I was complaining about this problem of finding the source of a story at the first two Seattle MindCamps. As a journalist, I wanted to have a "smart" RSS reader. One that could figure out what the theme of a story was, track links back in those stories back to the original source. Of course, it wasn't just about links, you'd have to look at timestamps as well.

It finally occured to me that RSS really needs to support sources in the root code, but even that alone isn't the answer. The answer, like a great many things in the Web 2.0 world, is crowdsourcing.

I should be able to see two stories in my RSS reader, see that one was the source and that the others were all derivitave, and manually link it back. Something like a drag-and-drop interface that would let me insert a secondary story into what I thought it was related to. That information should be uploaded back to a server, which then pushes that information back out to others using the same service. This serves two missions ... you can then pass that information on to others, so they know where the story came from. Second, that allows people to see additional stories that might not be in their RSS feeds, which is my other main gripe with RSS ... the echo chamber. RSS's big flaw is that you have to manually sign up for feeds, but you have no way of easily finding other feeds outside of your own field of vision while inside the reader. Having what are essentially "suggestions", similar to how TiVo does it, gets around that problem, and linking it to a source story seems like an elegant way of integrating it.

If this sort of feature was implemented in Google Reader, it would instantly crush other online RSS readers.